| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

María Elena Díaz. The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. (Cultural Sitings.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xviii, 440. $49.50.

In 1670, the Spanish crown confiscated the privately owned El Cobre copper mines in eastern Cuba, a military frontier area of thriving contraband that, like other mining complexes in the Americas, articulated with a hinterland of cattle ranching and small-scale foodstuffs, tobacco, and sugar production. Until crown rule ended in 1780 the mostly creole royal slaves who worked the mines, and free and freed inhabitants and their descendants, known collectively as the cobreros, pursued a special relationship with the Spanish crown through their recognition of the king as their benefactor and ultimate arbiter of justice. In 1678, the political and social recognition of the mining settlement as a community was heightened with the crown designation of pueblo (village) status to El Cobre. 1

Concomitant with this event was the transformation of the Virgin Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre from an obscure early seventeenth-century hermitage and local cult to an important Marian shrine. Popular beliefs surrounding the Virgin's power to intervene on behalf of the cobreros, and news of the Virgin's miracles drew ecclesiastics and lay Spanish and creole devotees to the annual festivities in El Cobre. For the cobreros who claimed the Virgin as their patroness and their protectress, the partaking of this encompassing dominant culture "helped to produce this major Marian tradition in their patria chica [and] in doing so, they also conferred their own locally distinctive political and social significations to 'their' tradition" (p. 145). . . .

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